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Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Journals and Correspondence
NOT ONLY DID ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH (1906-2001) live through most of the twentieth century, but her adventures, personal history, and written reflections made a significant mark upon her era. A pioneer aviator and an author, she was an explorer of the world outside as well as the world within. Her gift in both was for communication, and her writings touch readers deeply to this day.
Her early diaries and letters focus upon her meeting, marriage, and early life with my father, Charles Lindbergh. They begin with school years and go on to a certain Christmas she spent in Mexico when her father was the ambassador and the famous young aviator visited on a goodwill tour following a 1927 nonstop solo flight from New York to Paris. The account continues with their courtship, wedding, and youthful flying days together, when my mother became a pilot, too, and they explored possible air routes for the fledgling aviation industry. The story extends through the tragedy of the death of their first son, Charles, and then into the years before and during the Second World War.
My parents' trips together ended before the war was over, and my mother stopped flying entirely. With those pioneering days in the past, she turned to writing and raising a family. The letters and journals of her latter years reveal a very different aspect of her life.
During my lifetime, my parents did not own an airplane, though my father continued to fly, serving as a consultant, traveling the world for the rest of his life. My mother's path was very different. All the outward explorations she had joined were replaced by an inward journey, one she described later as a "journey toward insight."
Her last volume of letters, published as Against Wind and Tide, represents life between her fortieth and eightieth birthdays, and follows a period of substantial growth. She knew who she was as a woman and an artist, and she registered marked changes in her relationship with her husband. The journey begins early in 1947, at a time when she was assessing her own physical and emotional turmoil at the end of her childbearing years, as well as the damage and devastation she...